BizTalk Server 2010 unleashed book

22 September 2011

Back in the days when I was working with BizTalk 2004 I always had the book
‘Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed‘ close by on my desk.
Later on, when BizTalk 2006 was released the same was the case for the book ‘Professional BizTalk Server 2006‘.

It is not my intention to fail other good BizTalk books, but in my view the
above mentioned books are the BizTalk bibles that every developer must have.

Good news is that such a bible is now also available for BizTalk Server 2010.
Yesterday, I received a copy from Jan Eliasen (one of the authors). The book is
called ‘BizTalk Server 2010 unleashed’.

I helped Jan out by reviewing his chapters while he was in the process of
writing. Currently I have only read his chapters but I can still say the book
looks very promising.

In my view this is the book that every BizTalk 2010 developer needs on his
desk! It is writing by BizTalk experts: Brian Loesgen, Charles Young, Jan
Eliasen, Scott Colestock, Anush Kumar and Jon Flanders.

So to all the authors: thanks for delivering a new version of the BizTalk
bible to the community :-)

2 Comments | BizTalk | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

Saravana Kumar at the Dutch BTUG

21 June 2011

I’m very happy to announce that Saravana Kumar has accepted my invitation to speak at the upcoming BizTalk User Group (BTUG) meeting in Almere on June, 29th. Saravana will talk about and demo BizTalk 360.

Saravana has been working with BizTalk Server since the first product release early in 2001, and has many years experience in architecture, design, and development of mission critical systems focusing mainly on Microsoft Technologies. He worked as one of the Lead BizTalk Server consultants in the National Health Service (NHS) project in UK for 3 years, one of the biggest public sector projects in the world and largest implementation of BizTalk Server 2004.
He is very passionate about upcoming Microsoft technologies. In year 2005 he won the Connected Systems Developer competition under MCP category for designing and building SQL Service Broker Management Studio 2005.
Currently, Saravana is an independent consultant focused solely on Microsoft based integration solutions using BizTalk Server. Microsoft published his white paper Understanding Design-Time Properties for Custom Pipeline Components in BizTalk Server.
Saravana is awarded "Most Valuable Professional (MVP)" for BizTalk Server every year since 2007. Finally Saravana owns and maintains the BizTalk 24*7 community site.

This is your chance to hear and meet one of the top international BizTalk community members. You can register here.

3 Comments | BizTalk | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

BizTalk 360

7 June 2011

I assume anybody in the BizTalk space would have known BizTalk 360 by this time. I though I’ll just give my view of the product here.

BizTalk 360 tries to address some of the real challenges we face on a BizTalk environment, especially controlled environments like Production and Test environments. There are 3 core features I personally like about BizTalk 360

Governance/Auditing: This is such an invaluable addition to the tool, on a controlled environment it’s very important to know “who did what”. There were so many instances in the past, where we struggle to identify who stopped the host instance or who Unenlisted a send port etc. With BizTalk 360 we’ll know exactly who did that activity.

Fine Grained Authorization: This allows controlling the user’s access to the environment in a fine grained manner. It helps us reuse the environment by multiple departments/projects, without the fear of one interfering with other resources. We also don’t need to provide direct access for users to access the physical machines.

Topology: We got multiple environments with multiple configurations. In the past when we need to understand the network topology we either need to login to the server and work out BizTalk/SQL server configurations. But with BizTalk 360, it just dynamically plots the network diagram.

The great thing about it, there is a free version as well. The free developer version got pretty much all the essential things that will be useful for development purpose. The only downside I can see is, BizTalk 360 reached the market bit late. If this product was available 3 years ago, I’m pretty sure by this time every reasonable sized company would have got one. But late is better than never.

The commercial editions are also priced reasonably given the amount of functionality it got. I personally know Saravana Kumar, the fellow Microsoft BizTalk Server MVP who is one of the founders of BizTalk 360. I will hugely recommend anyone using Microsoft BizTalk Serer to take a look at BizTalk 360.

1 Comment | BizTalk | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

Visual 2010 BizTalk project woes

18 November 2010

I sometimes find myself in a situation where I need to make direct modifications to the XML code of an orchestration, map or pipeline. In Visual Studio you can do this easily by opening the file with the non default editor (right click orchestration file, ‘Open With…’ and ‘XML (Text) Editor’).

I encounter very strange behavior for the different file types (orchestrations, maps, pipelines) after I opened them in the Visual Studio 2010 XML editor. For schema files the behavior is as expected. For the other file types it looks like the default editor binding is missing after opening the file in the XML editor.

Orchestrations:

Steps to reproduce:
- right click orchestration (.odx) file in solution explorer
- choose ‘Open With…’
- choose ‘XML (Text) Editor’
- close the orchestration (save is not necessary)
- open the orchestration with the default editor (double click)

Results:
The orchestration opens but displays a very strange screen. It looks like a mix between the orchestration and the code behind:

image

Besides this there are the context menu for the specific orchestration has changed. Two options are added:

image

Maps:

Steps to reproduce:
- right click map (.btm) file in solution explorer
- choose ‘Open With…’
- choose ‘XML (Text) Editor’
- close the map (save is not necessary)
- open the map with the default editor (double click)

Results:
In this case the map opens with the correct mapper editor but there are also two extra options added to the context menu as is the case with orchestrations.

Pipelines:

Steps to reproduce:
- right click pipeline (.btp) file in solution explorer
- choose ‘Open With…’
- choose ‘XML (Text) Editor’
- close the pipeline (save is not necessary)
- open the pipeline with the default editor (double click)

Results:
For pipelines Visual Studio opens the XML representation when double clicking. It seems as if the default editor has changed.

image

This is very annoying. Is it just me? Do you have this too at your development box?

Workaround:
The workarounds I found are:
- Choose ‘Open with…’ and pick the default editor from the list.
- Open the BizTalk project (.btproj) with notepad and remove the ‘<subType>’  xml nodes for every file. After open the project again in Visual Studio it is fixed (until you open the file with the XML editor again).

I’m using BizTalk 2010 RTM (developer edition), Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Do you have this too?

I raised this issue on the Microsoft connect site.

6 Comments | BizTalk | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

BTUG meeting 2 december: BizTalk 2010

15 November 2010

nederlandse-vlag

Op 2 december a.s. geef ik samen met Steef-Jan Wiggers een presentatie over BizTalk Server 2010.

Wil je weten wat er allemaal nieuw is in BizTalk 2010 kom dan naar de BTUG meeting op 2 december.

Naast onze presenatie zijn er nog twee andere presentaties:

- BizTalk 2010 en Trading Partner Management  (Richard Sargeant)
- Extended and Scalable integration through the cloud (Gijsbert in ’t Veld)

Note to international readers of my blog:
The above post is aimed at the Dutch community and therefor only published in Dutch language. Unless you want to learn Dutch you can safely ignore it (I realize that is probably true for all my posts). Smile

Leave a Comment » | BizTalk | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

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